15 September 2016 10:36 AM

It must be 40 years since I first saw the film 'Operation Daybreak', about the assassination in Prague of the monster Reinhard Heydrich. I hadn’t been to Prague then (I would put that right two years later). That unique city, as imagined but never seen, had a powerful, mythical, almost mystical hold over my mind. It still does, provided I stay away from it. Recent visits, in which I have come to see it as a modern place rather than a dark and lovely stage set on which good and evil do battle, have rather spoiled it for me. I do understand that its inhabitants much prefer it the way it is.

The Kafka associations and two films , ‘Operation Daybreak’ and Costa-Gavras’s now almost unobtainable ‘L’Aveu’ (‘The Confession’) about the Slansky show trials of 1953, helped fix it in my mind as a frightening place of violence, melancholy, gloom, betrayal, dungeons and defeat, but also a very beautiful one. Later I would come to read Lionel Davidson’s charming and enthralling ‘Night of Wenceslas’, later very badly filmed, in which the city – lovely and captivating, but hiding terrible menace - plays a starring role. As is the case with anyone in my generation, my mind was also full of black-and-white TV news pictures of Soviet tanks trundling through Wenceslas Square (which isn’t a square, as I now well know), bulldozing trams to one side (this sight made me realise what a potent thing a tank is. I’d seen trams and thought they were heavy, a useful obstruction if needed. But Moscow’s tanks just biffed them out of the way as if they were plastic toys). And I have some sort of memory of immense crowds at the funeral of Jan Palach, though perhaps I have made it up (having been privileged to see at first hand the equally enormous multitudes who turned up for the funeral of Czech Communism in the winter of 1989) . Then years of frozen silence.

An odd anomaly

I’m still not quite sure how ‘Operation Daybreak’, a western-made and financed film (it was called ‘The Price of Freedom’ in the USA, a title I’ll return to), got the co-operation of the Communist Czechoslovak authorities, less than ten years after the extinction of the Prague Spring. Remember, it is about Czechs trained in Britain, making an attack on the Germans in 1941-2. Czech co-operation with Britain in the 1939-45 war tended to be forgotten or suppressed. Warsaw Pact Czechoslovakia owed its territorial restoration (apart from sub-Carpathian Ukraine, then in Soviet hands, now in Ukraine) and its form of government to the USSR’s victory over Hitler and the resulting Yalta settlement. Likewise, they owed to Stalin the reunification of the country after Hitler’s removal of Slovakia from Prague’s control. Slovakia, encouraged by Berlin to break away from post Munich Czecho-Slovakia(note the hyphen added to the country’s name at the time), was treated very differently from the Czech lands under Nazi rule.

They also owed the ethnic cleansing of German-speaking Czechoslovak citizens (thus ‘resolving’ the pre-war Sudeten German problem) mainly to the Soviets, who helped them carry it out with British and American blessing, under the deliberately forgotten Potsdam agreement.

The Wrong Allies

We in Britain were by then (the mid-1970s) very much the wrong allies. We were on the opposite side of Europe, in NATO. And it went deeper than that . Not only had Britain abandoned Czechoslovakia to Germany in 1938. It had then given a home to the exile government of Eduard Benes, the figurehead of Czech nationalism who was not really thought of as an ally by the Communists who seized power in Prague in 1948 in a ‘spontaneous’ mob-backed coup d’etat (which continued to fool some sympathisers for long afterwards, who described it as a ‘rising’ and argued that it was legitimate)..

It wasn’t as bad as it had been. The days were gone when Czech pilots, returning home to their supposedly liberated land from service in the RAF , were imprisoned as politically unreliable (see ‘Dark Blue World’, an interesting if disappointing film on this subject). But it wasn’t done to mention it, or draw attention to this awkward period in history. I remember a British diplomat in Prague describing to me the little ceremony those Czech RAF fliers would try to hold each year at a war memorial in a Prague cemetery. Many would struggle into their old RAF uniforms. And the whole thing would be very aggressively watched, photographed and filmed by spooks and musclemen from the StB, the Communist Secret Police of the time. Their existence challenged the official orthodoxy, that liberation had come solely from Moscow.

Maybe the Prague Communists of the early 1970s just wanted the dollars, to help finance the mildly prosperous consumer society they were creating to soothe the wounds of 1968 and encourage forgetfulness. Whatever the explanation, Prague was the star of the film , Prague as it then was, as I first saw it, black with age and neglect, falling to bits, indifferent to tourists, ancient, sinister, seductive, shabby within and without, an inhabited cemetery of great loveliness and enormous gloom, whispering from its many-spired sooty towers the last enchantments of an older, crueller, yet also more beautiful and more exciting age. Perhaps that is why , when the barbarities of the past came to life again the mid-20th century, they did this so horribly in that particular city.

A Man So Horrible He had Two Funerals

One scene from ‘Operation Daybreak’ is probably clearer in my mind now than in the film. I find my imagination quite often embellishes and lengthens scenes in films watched long ago. When I finally track them down, episodes which last many minutes in my recollection are over in 20 seconds. But the film-makers’ re-staging of Heydrich’s Prague funeral must have shocked the city at the time, only 35 years after the real thing. Hitler gave Heydrich two lots of obsequies, one in Prague and one (with lots of Nordic fir trees and Wagner) in Berlin, with an armoured train-ride in between. This was not to make sure he was dead. The Prague ceremony was held to hammer home to the Czechs just who was in charge, and how much they were going to pay for the death of Hitler’s favourite. In the film it is a pagan occasion of barely-suppressed savagery and vengeance, the thudding SS drums a message of evil to come.

An SS Film Crew Makes a Horror Movie

I also recall a clever, deeply shocking shot of an SS camera crew, complete with clapperboard and very modern camera, but garbed in the armour, death’s head badges and deadly-black uniform of their hellish society, swinging their lenses towards the ruins of Lidice, one of two villages (everyone remembers Lidice, nobody remembers the other, Lezaky) destroyed and subjected to mass murder, including women and children, as collective punishment. Unlike so many other German atrocities of the period carried out in secret, this one was openly avowed and publicised by Berlin. They wanted the world, and especially their subject peoples or those like us and the USSR, still insisting on fighting them, to know they were capable of this. All of us live within a century of this event, an open, purposeful, publicised mass reprisal murder in civilised Europe. And yet we think we’re safe and that there is such a thing as progress. Lidice was only a small part of the bloodbath. Many others were murdered elsewhere.

Year later I saw the film again on a rather inadequate DVD seemingly made for the Arab market, in which the subtitles for the German-language segments were not much help. And yet it still had some of its power, after all that time. Anton Diffring, as Heydrich, was suitably hateful and arrogant – there was a legend that Heydrich had defiantly donned the ancient crown of Bohemia to underline his absolute power, so activating an old curse and ensuring his death. He is shown doing so. In that part of the world, where violence and legend are in the bones of the landscape, such things seem more credible.

From 'Daybreak' to 'Anthropoid'

Now the story is once again the subject of a film ‘Anthropoid’. This is in fact the genuine name of the operation, which was nevr called ‘Daybreak’ , though it is a better title. ‘Daybreak’ came from the title of the book about the event ‘Seven Men at Daybreak’ by Alan Burgess (once an RAF pilot) , a book now so rare that it is on sale for mad prices in the Internet, and so effectively unobtainable.

Much of this new film is spoiled for me by the casting of Cillian Murphy, the absurdly good-looking star of the unwatchably preposterous BBC drama ‘Peaky Blinders’, as Jozef Gabcik, one of the assassins. You can find pictures 0f Sgt Gabcik ( a Slovak) on the Internet. His resemblance to Cillian Murphy is slight. Perhaps as a side-effect of ‘Peaky Blinders’ (as so often in films about the past) no opportunity is lost (I put this mildly) for the lighting of a cigarette, though only the glamorous ignition tends to be shown, not the half-smoked stub jutting from the corner of the mouth or jammed between yellow fingers, nor the grinding out of it in some nasty place, let alone the revolting smelly piles of debris in ashtrays, or the jaundiced tinge the damned things left everywhere; let alone the grey lined faces of the smokers and their hacking, productive coughs with their ever-present promises of major phlegm expulsion.

I’ll be told that Anthony Andrews, as yet undiscovered by Brideshead, who played the same part in ‘Operation Daybreak, might also be a bit distractingly good looking. But somehow he wasn’t. Andrews can efface his beauty quite a bit, when he chooses, and did so rather brilliantly in the later scenes of ‘Brideshead’ where he played a washed-up, broken old soak with great power.

What I can’t recall from ‘Daybreak’ and couldn’t get from ‘Anthropoid’ is any great consideration of the claim often made that Churchill thought the Czechs were a bit too quiescent and content under German occupation, and hoped to end that by killing Heydrich. In short, he is said to have been counting on a severe retaliation by Hitler. Though whether he expected what he got, or rather what the poor Czechs got, who can say? Even Churchill, a man who knew a lot of history, may not have fathomed the National Socialist capacity for wickedness. Idealists are so much more dangerous than ordinary tyrants.

We did several rather questionable things during the long years when we had no army on the European continent, and to this day it is hard to discuss them without meeting the wall of rage which I encounter if I criticise our bombing of German civilians. NOTE: Since first writing this passage, with its reference to Churchill’s alleged attitude, I’ve made some effort to back it up with historical warrant, and can’t find anything which implicates Churchill, though another name does come up, which I’ll come to. I’ve kept it in because I am still not sure of the truth, would be glad of any contributions or references which either confirm it or explode it, and because I decided it would be dishonest to cut it out, as I have long believed it and often said it. Certainly the Czechs were more lightly occupied than many other of Hitler’s subject peoples, their factories produced valuable armaments for the German Reich, and attempts to send in saboteurs by parachute often failed, ending in the denunciation of the agents or in the round-up and massacre of the resistance members who had helped them.

They Rightly Feared Reprisals

But I will say one thing for ‘Anthropoid’ (which follows ‘Daybreak’ quite closely in many aspects but not all - most modern film critics don’t seem to have seen ‘Daybreak’, or at least don’t mention it if they have). It makes it clear that those who helped Heydrich’s assassins did not, in many cases, find out till rather late what it was they were aiding – by which time, of course they were doomed to appalling fates by their participation. And it does not hide the fact that leading figures in the Czech resistance, on the spot, were horrified when they learned of the plan, opposed it and tried to get it stopped by appealing to London. (They were, in their defence, already gravely demoralised by the clever and efficient repression which Heydrich and his forerunners had visited on them. They had been penetrated and many of their best people had been arrested and murdered). This is all true and very much confirmed by the authoritative book on the subject, Professor Callum Macdonald’s 1989 work ‘The Killing of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich’ .

According to Macdonald, the man who wanted to go ahead with the operation was Eduard Benes, who seems to have spoken personally to Gabcik before he set off. With the USSR now in the war, Benes need a major stroke against the Nazis to show that the non-Communist Czech resistance was capable of potent action. If Churchill opposed or encouraged this, I don’t know, and would be grateful for any reference.

I thought that the depiction of the assassination in ‘Anthropoid’ was wrong because in it the bomb aimed at Heydrich’s car also damages a passing tram and wounds many of its occupants(the event took place on a hairpin bend in an untouristed part of Prague, north-west of the city centre). The earlier film shows the events taking place in a deserted street. But Macdonald’s book confirms that ‘Anthropoid’ is absolutely accurate. It also confirms that both assassins found girlfriends in Prague during the long months between their (botched) landing and the killing.

What would YOU have done?

The treatment of the traitor Curda, who betrayed his comrades for a huge reward and to save his skin( see below), is perhaps a little inaccurate. I doubt that he was rotten from the start, and I don’t think the Gestapo had any need to beat his evidence out of him. He was just frightened out of his wits once the reprisals started, assumed the German would be in power forever, and did what many others would have done. Indeed, when he was brought back to Prague to be tried and hanged, he said in court that anyone else would have done what he did, given the huge size of the reward (and his likely fate if he was tracked down).

‘Anthropoid’ also invents an incident at the beginning of the film, in which the ordinary Czechs who discover the parachutists limping, lost, through the snow, appear to betray the two agents. This never happened. The men who found them helped them, and smuggled them to Prague. They were mistakenly dropped hundreds of miles from their intended landing point, missed their rendezvous and made contact with the resistance only by guesswork and luck, amid a great deal of entirely justified mistrust.

The end of the assassins’ story, with the two men and several other parachutists surrounded by the Waffen SS in a Prague Church, and their legendary, epic last strand against the Nazis (which really ought to be better known) is lengthily portrayed, as it must be. But it is not, alas, the end.

Unbearable to watch

In both films the Moravec family who sheltered the assassins are prominently featured, especially Mrs Moravcova and her gentle, violin-playing, hero-worshipping teenage son Ata. Anyone who knows the story must tremble for those courageous, honourable people as soon as the assassins come into their lives. And they duly encounter a fate so horrible and distressing that I will not recount it in detail here. In my view ‘Anthropoid’ gives too much detail of that fate, but you could, I suppose, make a moral case for doing so, if only to remind people of how bottomlessly wrong torture is and how terribly human beings can behave when they think that cruelty is justified by necessity. But I thought we knew that about the Nazis. Maybe we are forgetting it. Cover your eyes if you prefer.

You can certainly make such a case for the awful scenes of torture shown in ‘The Battle of Algiers’, a film which did a lot to convince me that there can never be any excuse for the use of this method by any country which calls itself civilised, whatever the supposed gains.

Nazi torture, of course, requires no such examination. It involves the servants of evil doing evil things for evil ends. It is uncomplicatedly wrong. The issue here is quite different. Knowing what we knew of the German National Socialists, and of the sordid, cruel gangster Heydrich¸ were we right to embark on an operation which was more or less bound to bring about retaliation of a mediaeval type (as it indeed it did)?

There is something in me that says no, and I am not satisfied by being told in the closing credits that Heydrich was an architect of the Holocaust (as indeed he was). He was a foul man, a nasty bullying philanderer and pervert who ceaselessly betrayed his ‘good Nazi’ wife (most of the Nazi elite were amoral in their personal lives, to put it mildly, a fact not often dwelt upon, for some reason. Heydrich’s sordid morals did not harm him in the eyes of Hitler) as well as a mass killer and wielder of terror.

Nor am I impressed by the other postscript in which it is stated that, after the killing of Heydrich, Britain revoked the Munich agreement and welcomed Czechoslovakia as a full participant in the alliance for freedom. This just draws attention to the fact that, before 1942, the relationship was much more ambiguous – and to the fact that ‘freedom’ for Czechoslovakia took the form, after Yalta, of subjection to Soviet Power for 40 long hard years, plus the savage expulsion of ethnic Germans mentioned above and described here in my posting on the Potsdam Agreement and the fine book about it by R.M.Douglas ‘Orderly and Humane’ http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/11/orderly-and-humane.html

Happily Ever After?

I also note that in the end, Czechoslovakia was dismantled altogether, once again waving goodbye to Slovakia (Benes would have been appalled by this, I am sure) and absorbed, in pieces, into the EU. Does any of this justify what we see happening to poor Ata Moravec, whose pitiable fate in the film might be said to represent all the thousands of other gentle people hacked and smashed and torn to pieces in the red mist of vengeance which followed the assassination of Heydrich? I am by no means sure that it does.

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20 June 2014 5:08 PM

My view is that the EU is a land empire rather than a comity of free nations. It allows Germany’s original 1915 Mitteleuropa plan for economic and political domination of central and eastern Europe to be pursued without war, while preserving the dignity and feelings of the nations which must lose sovereignty and independence as a result.

It also allows the USA to engage diplomatically on the side of this plan, which Washington believes preserves stability on the European continent.

France especially is consoled by a seat on the UN Security Council, a nuclear deterrent and other baubles. Each nation has its own different reasons for having gone into the EU, France’s and Germany’s being the most interesting and the most sharply contrasting. But it’s very unlike the original union of the American 13 colonies.

Since the absorption of the Warsaw Pact states, and the Baltic countries, whose feelings needed to be soothed because of their many decades as prisoners of Moscow, the EU has begun to move into zones (or think of moving into zones) which are really much more like colonies than countries. Of course some were more equal than others. No open distinction was made between Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania and Bulgaria (though their people’s right to work in other EU countries were differentiated).

The bits and pieces of Yugoslavia, and perhaps some of the Caucasus states, fall into a category quite different from these. They are in the end too poor and too small to be real equals of the original EU members. So, in my view, is Ukraine, whose status as a proper nation is questionable.

But now here comes Albania. According the Financial Times of London, this very troubled and very poor country, which had a special isolated status in the Cold War, closer to China than to the USSR, is now seeking ‘candidate status’ . It is said that Britain, the Netherlands, Greece and Germany are all in favour, as is Italy, which is so keen on Albania that Mussolini invaded it. Paris and Prague may be against it.

In any case, one effect of these manoeuvres has been an amazing battle in the village of Lazarat, with Albanian armed police fighting equally well-armed drug barons (using grenades and mortars) over a huge cannabis plantation. Who knows how long this has been going on? The Lazarat dope farms are said to be earning $6 billion a year, about half of Albania’s GDP (even Britain’s flourishing tax-free cannabis farms aren’t that big). Albania is, obviously, intending to show that its law-enforcement is up to EU standards, whatever that means.

Experience shows that, when the EU wants someone to join, they are found to be up to the required standard ( so Greece was allowed into the Euro, and ‘transparency’ was said to be fine in the far south-east). So prepare for Albanian membership and what that will mean. One of the things it surely means is that some people, at least, will begin to realise that the EU is a post-modern empire without an emperor, not a collaboration of equal nations for a bit of free trade. And that it is territorially ambitious.

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04 June 2014 5:13 PM

Czechoslovakia - The State that Failed, by Mary Heimann, Yale University Press, 2009:

We have a way of giving countries characters. Many educated, liberal-minded English people, for instance, admire France as a country of high culture, sexual jollity, good food and wine and supposedly enlightened politics. Poland has managed to get itself a reputation as a ‘Christ among nations’, a suffering and oppressed victim. Germany and Russia we think we know about, and if as it happens you know different (Germans aren’t humourless, Russians aren’t dour), don’t bother trying to tell anyone.

Most of these supposed national characters are based on at least partial truth, but they also mislead. There are still plenty of British people who have a strong dislike for France and the French, and there is an alternative view of France as unreliable ally, ruthless pursuer of self-interest, seen as aggressive nationalist force and cynical commercial and colonial competitor.

For me these things are almost entirely useless. There is no such thing as an angelic or diabolical country, though it may sometimes seem as if this is so. The truth is invariably far more complicated. But I must confess to having been misled quite seriously about Czechoslovakia.

In the great drama of the 20th century, Czechoslovakia is the beautiful upright maiden of democracy , repeatedly abducted, and worse, by her evil neighbours – and repeatedly betrayed by her supposed friends and relations. This impression is strongly reinforced, for those who visit, by the unique beauty of Prague, a city which appears at first sight to be too lovely, too delicate, too old and too mysterious to be real. Here we are -especially on a Spring evening , as I first saw it, the prospect softened by the polluted air that Communism always provided - on the borders of legend, a place where ideals might actually come true.

One of the great puzzles of our age is that, having been created out of the evil of World War One, raped and then rescued in World War Two, raped again in 1948 and rescued again in 1989, this shining example to all humanity, the Central European Switzerland, the exemplar of democracy in eastern Europe, has now actually ceased to exist.

If Czechoslovakia was so good, and if we really ought to have gone to war for her integrity in 1938, and must ever afterwards be ashamed of not having done so (and likewise be ashamed of standing by as Warsaw Pact troops crushed her flickering liberation in 1968), then how come that at the end of all this, with the evil empires all gone and the world freed and justice restored, Czechoslovakia has vanished from the map?

Is it possible that it wasn’t a very good idea in the first place? Have we completely misunderstood one of the central events of our age?

I rather think we have. The words that follow, by the way, are entirely my own opinions. But they have been stimulated by reading (more or less during every available moment for the past week) an excellent history of that country by Mary Heimann. I should mention here that she is English - as her book ‘Czechoslovakia – The State that Failed’ received a pretty savage initial reception , some of it based on the misconception that she was German and that therefore she would think that, wouldn’t she? Scholars have since recognized that it is a serious and even-handed work.

Her description of the founding of the state is thoughtfully sceptical. Czech nationalism, by no means cruelly stamped out under the Habsburgs, simply did not envisage, before 1914, the sort of state which came into being, especially a state with a huge German-speaking minority. Reasonable autonomy was all that they desired.

But 1914 created an opportunity, and opportunities create opportunists, just as wars create propaganda and dislocation, and provide ways for cynical outsiders to destabilize existing empires, and for ambitious insiders to help them. I’ve often wondered if, had they been able to see even 20 years into the future, let alone 50, the statesmen of Versailles would have been so anxious to bring an end to the Austro-Hungarian empire.

But President Woodrow Wilson (after whom Bratislava was nearly named Wilsonovo) wanted national self-determination for its own sake. And France, in its endless, futile struggle to suppress Germany and prevent it dominating Europe, wanted allies encircling Germany. And Thomas Masaryk (the 'President-Liberator’) was a brilliant promoter, myth-maker, diplomat and fixer, who managed to persuade the allies to recognize frontiers for his new-country which were almost wholly unhinged. Heimann notes that this bright new era began with what was, in effect, a military dictatorship.

No wonder. The country was hard to govern from the start, as it was anything but homogeneous. The inclusion of a chunk of what is now Ukraine (lost in 1938 and never returned) , plus the absorption of large slices of Hungary, were bad enough. But the swallowing of a huge German-speaking minority which had little interest in being part of a new Slavic state would lead in time to two great tragedies , one the Munich crisis and all its attendant miseries and spite, and the other the Potsdam agreement and the unspeakable mass expulsions of Germans from their ancestral homes, discussed at length elsewhere on this blog - see here

Czechoslovakia’s democracy, though certainly superior to the systems of its neighbours, was far from perfect. A fictional ‘Czechoslovak’ nationality was invented, pretending that there were not deep and significant differences between Czechs and Slovaks, to conceal the size and significance of the huge German minority, and to ensure that it could be outvoted and outmanoeuvred in the formation of coalitions. The treatment of the German minority thereafter was by no means totally liberal. Impartial observers recorded plenty of petty discrimination in such things as state appointments.

It probably couldn’t have been that liberal, if the state was to survive in its original form. Multinational empires can and do exist. But multinational countries are almost invariably a contradiction in terms, and the immense care with which Switzerland’s Cantonal system was created was never attempted in Czechoslovakia, and probably wouldn’t have worked if it had been.

The ghastly ‘solution’ to such problems is almost always the same – ethnic cleansing.

Meanwhile the Slovaks, distinct in many ways from the Czechs, and not doing so well economically, grew more and more distant , so that when Hitler destroyed the original state, they were in many cases more than willing to set up on their own as an independent Slovakia, leaving the Czechs as a sort of German province.

I should mention here that neither Czechs nor Slovaks come out as having behaved impeccably during the German mass-murder of the Jews. Mind you, few people did (the Bulgarians and the Danes being shining exceptions).

Was Hitler’s 1938 assault on Czechoslovakia inevitable, as all events in the past now seem to be? Or was it a capricious act of vengeful spite? It is possible to wonder. Heimann is also one of the few people who bothers to mention the so called ‘May Crisis’ of 1938, which brought Europe almost to war over false intelligence (from Prague’s notoriously useless spy service) that Germany was about to invade. The resulting futile and unsettling panic made Hitler livid, but also infuriated France (which told the Czechs angrily it had no wish to go to war on their behalf) , and Britain.

As for Czechoslovakia having been able to fight a serious war with Germany while the Allies mobilized, The Czech Defence Minister Jan Syrovy, and the Chef of Staff, Ludvik Krejci, told the cabinet that defences on the German border were incomplete and that even if the USSR came to Prague’s aid (by no means certain), it would come too late. All the assumptions of Czech military planning – that France and Poland would fight on their side, that the Austrian border would not need defending that that Poland and Romania would both allow the Russians to send troops across their land – were invalid. Only one general wanted to fight.

Another powerful point in the book concerns the post-war government, in the era between liberation and the February 1948 Communist putsch. Heimann points out that the ‘democratic’ politicians were themselves so badly compromised by the lawlessness and violence of the ethnic cleansing they had encouraged or permitted that they were not well-placed to oppose the even dirtier methods of the Communists when the crucial moment came. She is also scathing about Edvard Benes and Jan Masaryk, both credited by most commentators with having opposed the takeover when in fact they did little to prevent it and could even be said to have been complicit in it.

The description of the country’s miserable plunge into the slime-pool of Stalinism should be read by anyone who doubts that civilized people can be terrorized into almost anything, and that very few will stand up to it when it comes. There's an interesting point at which Zdenek Mlynar explains to westerners that life in Communist Czechoslovakia was not quite like '1984', in that you only had to pretend to love Big Brother. But she also provides a fine quotation from Vaclav Havel about the subtle, pervasive corruption of Communism, which implicated all its victims in lies, leaving only a few saints untouched.

Her analysis of the ‘Prague Spring’ is (to me) entirely new and very interesting, and she also makes the important point that 1968 gave birth to Eurocommunism, through which the European left shook off the grey mantle of Stalinism and re-invented itself in what ended up, in Britain, as Blairism (that bit is my interpretation, not hers).

Her account of 1989, and the eventual fall of Communism is once again illuminating though, having witnessed quite a bit of it, I would have liked more, not least about the very strange episode of the student demonstration in which one student was wrongly said to have been killed, and in which Secret Police agents seems to have acted as provocateurs.

She also explains how and why the ‘Velvet Divorce’ (so-called) between the Czechs and the Slovaks came about and that it was not always that gentle.

My conclusions are what readers here might expect – that it would have been a good deal better for everyone, especially the inhabitants of what was to become Czechoslovakia, if Austria-Hungary had survived; that the creation and encouragement of shiny new nations in this difficult part of the world is seldom as straightforward as it looks and is often a cover for aggressive diplomacy by someone or other; and that in the end reality will triumph over artificial borders (or as Louis MacNeice put it in Bagpipe Music’ ‘If you break the b****y glass, you won’t hold up the weather’).

And also to note that the end of it all, if this is the end, is that Czechoslovakia has now been cut up much as it was cut up in 1938-40, and lies under the domination of a revived and non-militaristic Germany which, happily, has at last found peaceful means of establishing its hegemony ovar Mitteleuropa.

Now, if only the EU would admit to being Germany by other means, and if only it would stop vainly classifying its eastward expansion s some sort of idealistic crusade against corruption and oligarchs, and recognise it for what it is, then we might all learn something from a century of misery: that is, that where great powers clash, compromise is invariably better than war, and stability better than radical, adventurous utopian change.

I'll say it again and again until it catches on:

Utopia can only ever be approached across a sea of blood, and you never actually get there.

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28 March 2014 5:17 PM

‘Paul P’ writes ‘Mr Hitchens again uses the device of rubbishing associations with Munich in 1938, again intimating that Crimea in 2014 is as meaningless to our interests as was Czechoslovakia in 1938, therefore the expansionism of the respective leaders of 1938 and 2014 can be ignored. I think this is delusional analysis, and possibly as dangerously delusional in 2014 as quite obviously it turned out to be in 1938. We at this distant remove, and on an island to boot, might be understood for regarding Putin's moves in Crimea as too distant to be concerned about or bothered with. But what of the other Balkan and Baltic states which are now wondering (if their TV-polled residents' worries can be taken seriously) if Russia might also be considering their re-entry into the precinct of Russian hegemony? A quick 'referendum' among Russian-speaking ethnic minorities in Estonia, say, might encourage Putin to think about another land-grab, and another, and then another. All he need fear from the West at every 'signature on a piece of paper' is increased travel restriction on his oligarchs. That and a too-late scramble by western governments to find non-Russian sources of energy. Mr Putin must be laughing his former-KGB boots off.’

I thought I’d address this as it is such a clear and concise statement of the beliefs being encouraged by almost all media coverage of recent events in Ukraine and Russia.Let us see if I am in fact guilty of 'delusional' thinking.

It might first of all be worth addressing the Czechoslovak question. Can any reader explain what Britain’s interest was, in 1938, in the survival of Czechoslovakia as a state?

Of course it would have been pleasanter if it had survived. With all its many faults, the Czechoslovak state of 1938 was a relatively free and rather prosperous country. I feel this very strongly having visited Prague many times (long before it was fashionable or even much known about), and having a strong emotional sympathy for the Czechs, having seen them under the Soviet heel and having watched them being liberated in the winter of 1989. It was certainly much preferable to the other countries created or shaped by the Versailles Treaty, using leftover bits of the old Austro-Hungarian , Russian and German Empires - despotic Hungary, anti-Semitic undemocratic Poland, the mess of Yugoslavia. But self-indulgent sentimentality about other countries is no more than that, unless it is matched by armed force and the willingness and ability to use it. Britain has never had either that force or that readiness.

But multi-national states are tricky things to manage. Belgium remains a hopeless failure, Switzerland is a rare success. Almost a quarter of the inter-war Czechoslovakia’s population were German, and the Czechs and Slovaks who formed a sort of Slavic bloc partly to outnumber the Germans more effectively, were not that harmonious. Poland coveted one piece of her territory, Hungary a much larger one ( and both cruelly and selfishly took what they wanted in 1938 after Munich). Opinions differ as to how well it worked. A revisionist history ‘Czechoslovakia: the State that failed’, by Elizabeth Neimann, has been much criticised for alleged unfairness and inaccuracy, and I’m not competent to judge. But the history of post-war Czechoslovakia, with the violent ethnic cleansing of the German population, and the eventual split between Czechs and Slovaks into two separate EU provinces, makes it difficult to work out how things might have continued if (by some miracle) the inter-war republic had survived.

I tend to suspect that, even without outside interference, Czechoslovakia would have ended up being dissolved, as it has been, though in a peaceful world without Hitler some humane way might have been found of returning its German speakers to German government, rather than the shameful expulsion and brutalities which actually happened, inflicted as they were largely on women and children. . I tend to think (contrary to current wisdom) that moving borders to suit people is usually a lot more sensible and humane than moving people to suit borders.

But Woodrow Wilson’s plan for Europe, which replaced the old multi-ethnic empires with not-very-mono-ethnic new nations, created too many complex and insoluble border questions, within and without the new states. An intended liberation ended up as an explosive mess, one which led directly to war in 1939 and which has now quietly been expunged by the Schengen agreement. It wasn’t just Germans in the wrong place, though there were a lot of them. It was Romanians in the wrong place, Poles in the wrong place, Ukrainians in the wrong place.

Under the old empires, this had been unpleasant for many smaller peoples. Under Versailles, it became a prelude to war, as there were now so many more disputed borders, and France, which had been at the height of its power in 1918, had rapidly sunk back into itself, denuded of young men, anxious for peace, without the will or the means to sustain the anti-German alliances it had gaily set up in the early 1920s. As for the USA, it had simply disappeared. Washington’s puniness as a land power was astonishing, with an army(in 1939) about the same size as Portugal’s, poorly equipped and trained, and a pitiful air force. Only the US Navy could be said to be a serious and well-trained modern military formation and that (of course) was of little use on Continental Europe. The same could be said of Britain, which had chosen in 1936 to develop a strengthened Navy, to guard the Empire, and a much-enlarged Air Force, to defend the home islands against what many then believed was the principal danger, aerial bombing . This, by the way, explains Churchill’s very wise refusal to throw the RAF into the Battle of France in 1940. That wasn’t what it was for.

So what we had in 1938 was a whole lot of unsustainable borders, most of them designed to cramp and limit Germany, unaddressed during the years when Germany had been a law-governed free country, and now festering badly just as Germany acquired an aggressive despotism. (By the way, those who compare Vladimir Putin with Hitler really should be careful. Domestically, Putin is repressive in an old-fashioned pre-Communist way, but his repression is simply not comparable even with that under Brezhnev, let alone the Stalinist system. Nor is he a Nordic racialist maniac).

The Sudetenland, by the way, had never been *German* , despite being just down the road, and along the Elbe valley, from Dresden and Saxony. But it had been *Austrian*, or rather Austro-Hungarian, and once Germany had swallowed Austria (which many democratic Austrians had wanted it to do in the 1920s, not least because this truncated remnant was just as devastated by hyper-inflation as Germany, but lacked the means of recovery ) the distinction wasn’t particularly important.

As I never tire of pointing out, the expansionist policies associated with Hitler were not his idea, or specifically National Socialist. They were German. The idea of a German-dominated ‘Mitteleuropa’, part political and part economic, stretching eastward across Poland and Ukraine, into the Baltic states in the North, and into the edge of the Caucasus in the South, originated with Friedrich Naumann in the middle of the Great War. It was largely put into effect at the 1918 Peace of Brest-Litovsk, but did not endure because Germany was soon afterwards defeated in the West. Naumann was not a militarist or a nationalist, but a civilised liberal still revered by the Modern Free Democrat Party. When he first set out his plan, Austria-Hungary still existed, which he considered part of Mitteleuropa, and he presumed it would continue to do so, so it would have included the territory which became Czechoslovakia, and which became independent Hungary, and which became inter-war Poland. Things, as always grew more complicated at the edges, in the Balkans and in Ukraine.

But one would have to be a convinced coincidence theorist to look at the recent eastward expansion of the EU and not see some congruence between Naumann’s scheme and the EU’s desired sphere of influence.

When you put that alongside the USA’s longstanding and enthusiastic support for the creation of a United States of Europe (papers making this absolutely clear were deposited by accident in the Georgetown University library a few years ago, and I have seen some of them myself. Much of the detail is to be found in Richard Aldrich’s interesting book ‘The Hidden Hand’), you can perhaps wonder about the origins of the current clash of interests in Kiev. Few things make me laugh more than British conservatives who think that the USA is on the side of ‘Euroscepticism’ and would welcome the recreation of an independent Britain. Nope.

Anyway, had we really wanted to preserve the anti-German states to the east and north of post-Anschluss Germany, our only conceivable ally would have been Stalin’s USSR. But Poland and Romania did not trust Stalin, and so there was no possibility of them allowing the Soviet Army across their territory to help the Czechs. Moscow was therefore able to posture as Prague’s friend, without having to do anything about it. Later, when we sent a delegation to Moscow in 1939, Stalin made it clear that he wanted a very free hand in Eastern Europe and the Baltics in return for any sort of anti-Hitler alliance. And we declined to give him this, which was why he turned instead to Hitler (who readily gave him half of Poland and the Baltic states) . This may well have seemed clever and principled at the time, but we later had to give far, far more away in return for Stalin’s involuntary alliance with us, after 1941.

My own view is that everyone under the ‘Habsburg Yoke’ in 1914 (right down to Gavril Princip) would have begged the Habsburgs to rule them forever and a day, if they had known what would come soon after their ‘liberation’ from Vienna in 1918. This is why I am so against attempts to reorder Europe radically. 1992 seems to me to have been a new Versailles, unreasonable, unsustainable and unrealistic, and the harder we stick to it, the more tragic and violent will be the end.

New Cold Warriors often warn of the threat to the three Baltic states. No doubt there is one, though I think it takes the form of internal destabilisation and installation of Moscow-leaning governments at some stage in the middle distance, rather than outright invasion. I hope not, but I suspect so. That threat would be incomparably smaller if they had stayed out of NATO and the EU. Moscow could tolerate the three countries indefinitely as neutral neighbours, but as forward bases for an expansionist alliance, they increase the risk of trouble, and especially of destabilisation, rather than decreasing it. Even Mikhail Gorbachev, about the soberest, most rational and open-minded Russian leader of modern times, was almost livid with fury over the Baltics’ demands for full independence. I don’t say this to endorse his feelings, though I think I understand them. I just say it to point out that it is a fact, and that it is only Russian weakness that has – up till now – prevented trouble over this.

I’m not sure where the Balkans come into this.

But I fear that some future Russian state, which might make Vladimir Putin look like Jimmy Carter, will indeed do the dreadful things the New Cold Warriors warn of. But if it does it will be because we didn’t have the sense to reach a reasonable compromise with Russia under its present government, so helping to bring about the elevation of a truly monstrous autocrat, as bad as we wrongly imagine Vladimir Putin to be. The more we slight and provoke Russia, the more aggressive and resentful Russia will become. So why do this?

This is in fact the *true* parallel between now and the pre-1939 world. We are in the late 1920s rather than in the late 1930s. The country which has been foolishly humiliated in defeat, and driven back behind unsustainable borders, is still open to reason and compromise and still part of the international diplomatic system. Vladimir Putin may not be Gustav Stresemann (who was a liberal democrat (not a Liberal Democrat) but more or less shared Hitler’s views on Germany’s lost eastern territory). But he is also emphatically not Adolf Hitler.

My other point about standing up for Czechoslovakia is that we haven’t done so even in this free, safe modern Hitler-Free, Stalin-free, unmilitarised world. Germany, in Europe’s name, has dissolved Czechoslovakia and nobody cares. It has no borders. It has been cut into two (or rather three, with the removal of sub-Carpathian Ukraine). Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist . And nobody minds or notices, because power-grabs through supranational bodies (which tactfully allow the conquered to fly their flags and pretend to be countries) are all right whereas power-grabs using naked armed force are not.

There’s a lot of sense in that. Naked armed force is horrible. But let’s not pretend that the abolition of European borders, and the imposition of a single currency, and the single market, are not a power grab. I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. The EU has finally taken Clausewitz into the post-modern world. The EU is the continuation of war by other means.

Don’t then act shocked if the other fellow responds in the same way. Moscow’s first response to the EU/NAT0 push to the west was the Eurasian Union, a sort of mirror to the EU. It didn’t work for various reasons. Next came gas politics, and next came the aid package.

And then, in response to Western media propaganda, western political interference, western street demonstrations, western exaggerations of the danger from the other side, came their more or less mirror image in Crimea and (to a much lesser extent) in the Russian-speaking east of Ukraine. The most reliable reports suggest that this policy was arrived at quite late on, after the collapse of the (EU-brokered) deal that had been supposed to save Yanukovich, and that pro-Moscow figures in Crimea insisted on full incorporation in Russia because they feared ending up in the sort of nowhere limbo endured by Moscow’s allies in South Ossetia and Transnistria .

People do go on about Vladimir Putin’s KGB past as if it automatically damned him . All accounts suggest that his role was very minor. Also most don’t understand that the KGB, especially its foreign intelligence branch, was the best-informed and most intelligent organ of the Soviet state. Its officers often spoke foreign languages and had lived abroad (as did and had Putin), and knew exactly how bad things were and how far the country had fallen behind. Mikhail Gorbachev himself was sponsored by the KGB chief Yuri Andropov, and I have often suspected that his project was, essentially, a KGB one which got out of hand. The 1991 putsch was a failed attempt to get things back under control. Vladimir Putin is a more successful attempt to do the same thing. But it is absurd to imagine that he wants the old USSR back. I think the collapse of the British empire was a global tragedy, just as he thinks the collapse of the USSR was one. But I don’t for a moment imagine it can be recreated, and I strongly suspect he doesn’t either. Also, like all sensible Russians, he knows that Soviet communism was stupid, wasteful and doomed, as was the USSR’s contest with the USA for global power. He wouldn’t want it, or the Cold War, back.

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03 March 2014 2:22 PM

This will take a bit of muscular effort. For the level of some contributions is quite low. For instance, Mr ‘skh.pcola’ writes: ‘Herr Hitchens is an anachronism. He would have fit right in the gang with Neville and the other quislings back in 1939 or so. Idiots that don't learn from history doom the rest of us to repeat it. What a misanthropic microencephalitic moron Hitchens is.’

And I took part (at about 9.30 this morning) in a brief discussion on BBC Radio 5 Live, in which a listener raged for some time against Russia and Russians, diagnosing that country as ‘paranoid’(I do not know what her qualifications were to make this diagnosis).

By contrast, I would urge readers to study an article by Sir Rodric Braithwaite, the best ambassador this country ever sent to Moscow, profoundly knowledgeable about Russia, who is also more than fluent in Russian, and the author of ‘Afgantsy’, a fine study of the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, writing in yesterday’s ‘Independent on Sunday’.

Sir Rodric gives a well-informed and thoughtful explanation of the origin of the dispute, and a cool assessment of our ability to intervene in it. How refreshing this is when compared to the temperature-raising coverage by journalists who cannot even pronounce ‘Simferopol’ , and the alarmist pronouncements of various schoolboy foreign ministers, who really ought to be forced to wear short trousers when speaking in public.

And I would also urge them to look at an article by Sir Christopher Meyer, who also served twice in Moscow (though not as H.M. Ambassador) and later became British ambassador to the USA, in today’s London ‘Times’. Alas, it is behind a paywall, but it contains a good deal of cool, clear thinking, and points out that it is up to us how much of a crisis we make of this event.

Jonathan Steele in the Guardian is also interesting and a corrective to much of the shouting and screaming going on:

He rightly points out that public opinion polls in Ukraine have shown a consistent nationwide opposition to NATO membership, not just among Russian-speakers, but in general.

Mr ‘pcola’ has done me a favour by making ( as someone was bound to do) the Hitler-Chamberlain-Czechoslovakia parallel.

I have argued unceasingly here that the World War Two myth has made serious discussion of foreign policy very difficult. So few people really understand what happened during that era, but that does not stop them from believing that they do.Thus they say idiotic things, over and over again. Worse, they think these things are clever.

If we really did believe that Czechoslovakia was such a good cause, and the world should have been plunged into years of slaughter, misery, privation and destruction for the sake of the inviolability of its frontiers, why is nobody nowadays interested in the following facts?

Czechoslovakia (a country I often visited and very much liked when it was still there) has ceased to exist. It simply doesn’t have enough of the features of sovereignty to make this claim, though it is polite to pretend otherwise just as we like others to pretend that we here in the Ukay are a sovereign country.

It no longer has any national borders, though I believe Slovakia still enforces some sort of border with Ukraine. In its Slovak section it no longer even has its own currency. The traveller can cross into and out of the divided chunks of former Czechoslovakia from Austria and Germany (from my personal experience) without any customs or border checks. I imagine it is the same with its other EU borders, thanks to the astonishing Schengen Agreement, which has abolished all the Versailles frontiers which World War Two was supposedly fought to restore, and quite a few other borders as well. I am always amazed that this Treaty is not more studied, or more understood as what it is – an immense revolution in European diplomacy and power.

The former Czechoslovakia’s defence, economic and other policies are entirely subject to the EU. It has been cut into two pieces not dissimilar from the partition imposed on it by Germany in March 1939. Its far eastern province, Transcarpathia, is now (quite amusingly) part of Ukraine, having been stolen by Hungary in 1939 and then re-stolen by Stalin in 1944-5.

Similar things could be said of Poland, which is also an EU vassal, and whose borders bear almost no relation to those it possessed in September 1939. Once again, the objectives for which we went to war in 1939 have not merely not been fulfilled, but actually trampled upon, first by the Yalta redivision of Europe, imposed by Stalin, and later, when the USSR collapsed, by the almost immediate absorption of former Warsaw Pact countries into the EU.

And nobody cares at all. Nor did they care when both those countries were subjected, for more than 40 years, to Communist secret police tyranny. Nor did they care when the Sudeten Germans (pretext for the original row) were driven with kicks and blows from their ancestral homes after 1945, in scenes of terrible cruelty which we had promised, as a nation, to prevent. I think we can make a new rule: The more people posture about foreign affairs, the less they really care about the people involved

So Neville Chamberlain’s unwillingness to go to war over either matter (it was Halifax, as far as I can discover, who got us into the Polish guarantee) seems, in retrospect, to have some merits, and to be in line with our own modern behaviour. I might add that Mr Chamberlain understood, as modern commentators in this matter often don’t, that in 1938 and 1939 the British Army was a tiny, feeble thing, and we had no means of imposing our will on continental Europe anyway.

To call him a ‘Quisling’ is a simple insult. Chamberlain was a patriot who acted honestly according to his own view of national interest. Vidkun Quisling was an active traitor to his country, during a period of foreign occupation.

So that’s that dealt with.

Now, what about Russian ‘paranoia’?

As I sometimes point out, Russia has good reason to be nervous. It has many possible threats to face. One contributor recently chided me for saying that the USSR faced a threat from Japan in the late 1930s and early 1940s. This is a forgivable error. Very few people are even aware of the undeclared war between Japan and the USSR which raged from 1938-1939. It ended (temporarily) at the widely-unknown battle of Khalkin Gol (also known as Nomonhan) in which Georgi Zhukov made his name and learned how to use tanks. Few also recall the severe tensions between the USSR and China which erupted in the 1970s, and may well erupt again, as China regards much of far eastern Russia as stolen territory, and eyes it keenly. Then of course there is the little problem with Germany, as often discussed here.

Any visitor to Sevastopol will find it contains many monuments to genuinely heroic defences of that city against invasion (one of those invasions was our more or less incomprehensible incursion into the Crimea 160 years ago, which achieved a good deal less than nothing and cost a great deal of lives). The biggest memorials commemorate the 1941-44 invasion by Germany, which was resisted and eventually expelled at great human and material cost, in battles whose names and nature are unknown to most in the ‘West’.

If they knew more about it, they might understand why Russians are ‘paranoid’. The country has no natural defensible borders. A street in southern Moscow, Ulitsa Bolshaya Ordinka (the street of the Great Horde) commemorates to this day the five-yearly visits to Moscow of the Great Horde, to collect tribute from that frontier city. We tend to think that the Urals, supposedly mountains but really rather unimpressive hills, form Russia’s eastern boundary. But it isn’t really true. From every direction, the heart of Russia lies open to invaders. Moscow has been invaded or occupied by Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians, The Golden (or Great) Horde, Crimean Tatars, Napoleon, No wonder the Russian word for ‘security’ (Byezopasnost) is a negative construction (‘Byez’ means ‘without’ ; ‘Opasnost’ means ‘danger’). The natural state of things is danger.

This is why Russians were alarmed and perturbed by the NATO meddling in the Balkans, the outer edge of Slavic, Orthodox influence. And several readers have rightly pointed out that the NATO intervention in Kosovo (1998-9) provides an interesting precedent for Russia’s intervention in Crimea. The province was lawfully part of Serbia. But its majority population desired independence. NATO thereupon lent its air force to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), so securing Kosovar independence from Serbia (recognised by the USA, Britain and most EU states), which will perhaps end in a merger with Albania.

One might add that states which supported the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the attack on Libya, cannot really get very hot under the collar about Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. It’s also interesting that Ukraine, while giving Crimea a great deal of autonomy, always strove to prevent a referendum on the region’s future, knowing for certain that it would lead to open calls for a return to Russian rule. Were I a Ukrainian politician or citizen, I would actively support the return of Crimea to Russia, because it was always bound to lead to trouble . Khrushchev’s transfer of the area to Ukraine in 1954 was a gesture, utterly unimportant in the days of the USSR. It made no real difference. But actual Ukrainian independence meant that it was always bound to lead to trouble. I can, (unlike most of the current 'experts’) show that I was aware of this difficulty years ago, here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/09/as-ukrainians-force-russians-to-turn-their-back-on-their-language-and-change-their-names-i-ask-is-th.html

This is why I knew instantly that the immediate decision of the Kiev putsch government, to attack the official status of the Russian language, was a significant act of aggrandisement and stupidity. If anyone doubted that fanatics were now in charge in Kiev, this decision dispelled all such doubts. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it didn’t trigger Mr Putin’s sarcastic counter-putsch in Simferopol and Sevastopol.

What continues to strike me about this whole row is the inability of most people to view Russia as a country, or Russians as people. Russia is portrayed as a bogeyman, and its people as either oppressed or as tools of a new Hitler.

Let me remind readers that Russia existed as a civilisation long before Lenin turned it into a Communist slum. This is the country of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky as well as of Stalin. The Leningrad Radio orchestra gave an astonishing performance of Shostakovich’s seventh symphony, in August 1942, after the city had endured months of starvation and bombardment (several musicians actually died of hunger during rehearsals, some collapsed during the performance, all were shivering from malnutrition). The Russians broadcast it through loudspeakers to the besiegers (they had shelled them first to silence their batteries during the concert) which was when the more intelligent Germans realised that they would never take the city, and that they had lost the war. For me, there are few more moving episodes in the history of warfare.

Russia still contains a large, educated, cultured middle class, who of necessity care more about history, literature and patriotism than their complacent, spoiled, semi-conscious western equivalents. They, their parents and their grandparents have seen with their own eyes what can go wrong with a happy life, how suddenly it can happen, how little you can do about it, if invaders come, or if fools are in charge of your country, or both.

For years now, trivial-minded, historically ignorant, efficient, glinting people have tried to turn Ukrainian independence into an attack on Russia. They did it in the ‘Orange Revolution’ and failed because the victors turned out to be as corrupt and divided as those they replaced (a problem which may well emerge again now they have had a second go). And now they have done it again.

And they feign surprise, and outrage, when Russia eventually takes the opportunity to stand up for its interest, certainly no more aggressively than the pious ‘West’ has acted in Kosovo, Iraq and Libya

I ask again, what Washington would do if, in a moment of national weakness, the lands the USA seized from Mexico by force in 1848 seceded, and Russian politicians came to Albuquerque to give their open support for rallies supporting an alliance between the new state and Moscow?

Or what we would think and do, if Russian politicians turned up in Belfast, Cardiff or Edinburgh, openly supporting those who wanted those parts of the country to break away from London’s control?

You only need to ask to know.

I still hope this will end without tears or blood, but the overblown, piously shocked rhetoric of western politicians and media is making that much harder.

But I must just address one question that is (rightly) bound to be put to me. I have said many times that Vladimir Putin stands against globalism and for national sovereignty. How , in this case, can he be said to be supporting Ukraine’s national sovereignty.

To begin with , I suspect that Mr Putin, and most Russians do not really regard Ukraine as a proper sovereign state, and I think they may be on to something. They view its existence as an artificial and accidental result of a moment of Russian weakness, which has since been maintained, for cynical reasons, by Western interference. Is Ukraine really sovereign, economically, diplomatically, militarily or in any other important way? Has it ever been?

I might add that Russia, bound by the modern rules of diplomacy, has refrained from compelling Ukraine to return to Moscow rule by naked force, as it would not have hesitated to do 50 or 100 years ago. Instead the Russians have sought to ensure that Ukraine remains very much under their influence, while Kiev retains formal independence. Something very similar can be said of the EU’s treatment of many of the former countries now under its rule, including our own. The polite fiction of sovereignty is maintained for the convenience of ruler and ruled.

But, because of the EU’s (and NATO’s, and the USA’s) aggressive and repeated attempts to disrupt this tactful arrangement, Russia feels the need to take some firm concrete action, both to stop this going further, and to deter future attempts to disaffect areas which Moscow believes are in its sphere of influence.

Such disaffection has gone quite far enough already, thanks to the weird, selective anti-Russian prejudices of so many in the USA. What exactly do these people see as the concrete reason for their hostility to Russia? What is it actually about? They don’t seem to care at all (for instance) about China’s takeover of Tibet and its very aggressive colonisation of Sinkiang. Is there any *American* interest involved? Or does it flow from the USA’s new role (often conducted against that country’s own best interest) as the pioneer of the new global border-free world? That, I think, remains the real issue. No British or American national interests are involved here (though German ones may be) . If they were, I’d be all in favour of defending them. This is about globalism versus national sovereignty, and the curious anomaly of Russia, an old-fashioned European country that is too big to be sucked into the EU, too small to be a superpower (and so invulnerable, like China) , too patriotic to be persuaded to dissolve itself.

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17 January 2014 5:42 PM

One thing after another has kept me from blogging this week. On Thursday I found myself at Radio 2, discussing the ‘Special Relationship’ on the Jeremy Vine programme, with Edward Lucas of the Economist. Edward is a very old friend, who was enormously helpful to me when, in the winter of 1989, I set out for Eastern Europe armed with little more than enthusiasm and excitement as the Communist world tottered.

That autumn and winter of adventure took me to Prague, East Berlin, Budapest and Bucharest and eventually to Moscow, and then on to Washington - and I suppose I could easily have ended up on the same side as Edward, who is the author of ‘The New Cold War’, remains far more sympathetic to the USA than I am, and preaches mistrust of Russia.

Why did we diverge? I don’t know. We’ve been in much the same places. Perhaps my abandoned Marxism caused me to care much more about the Communist side of Russia’s problems, and to be more forgiving of those difficulties which arise from Russia being Russia, and Russians being Russians. Perhaps it was a matter of eras. I lived in Moscow during the final twitches and death-rattle of the Communist Party. Edward was there mainly during the Yeltsin years.

Perhaps it’s just a different disposition. Also, one of my key formative experiences was the wooing of Sinn Fein and Gerry Adams by Bill Clinton, which became personal for me, and was enhanced by the tremendous analysis of the whole affair which Conor O’Clery, of the Irish Times, kindly shared with me. Conor’s sympathies in the matter were quite different from mine, (though we both tried very hard to respect each other’s patriotism) . But above all things, he is a superb reporter. I first met him in Moscow where he had bravely set up a bureau on a shoestring, and was one of the best correspondents operating at that time (even though he lacked the money and staff the bigger bureaux possessed) . His understanding of the how and why of the Irish triumph over Britain in Washington in those crucial months was far superior to that of anyone else outside the West Wing of the White House. And that fact in itself, that tiny Ireland was able to outmanoeuvre the mighty British Embassy, tells you much that you need to know about the alleged ‘Special Relationship’ an expression which, ever since, has caused me to snort with derision.

I wasn’t too keen on the American arrogance towards Russia after the collapse of Communism either. I saw it as a second-rate repeat of Versailles, a short-sighted triumphalism, combined with a nearly mad belief that Russia, given the ‘free market’ and ‘democracy’ would become just like everywhere else. You’ll have noticed that this hasn’t happened. How could it have done? Those osf us who had travelled through the Evil Empire by train had seen that the USSR’s economy was a great heap of rust, that it was far more disastrous than Western businessmen, fooled by the glitter of Yeltsin Moscow, could possibly grasp. As for ‘democracy’, what Russia lacked had always lacked, was the Rule of Law. Without that, ‘democracy’ might well end ( and on one occasion nearly did) with the return of the Communist Party with a legitimate majority.

Most normal Russians yearned for the days of Leonid Brezhnev, a fool’s paradise, true enough, but one where most of them had lived better than at any time before or since. They called it ‘the Golden Time’. A huge bronze plaque to Brezhnev, I was amused to see the other day, has now been restored to the building in which I (and he) lived in Moscow, the majestic and gloomy 26 Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Brezhnev’s plaque had been ripped down in the Gorbachev era. The wise and distinguished Mary Dejevsky, then the ‘Times’ correspondent, once described to me how she had watched it being uncermeoniously unscrewed and scornfully flung into a lorry. Where did it then go? At one stage it turned up in (of all places) the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin. Now it’s back, next to the matching plaque to Yuri Andropov, the KGB man who became leader, which Gorbachev allowed to remain, as Andropov had been his patron. My first assistant and translator, the mysterious Alla (provided, in my view, by the KGB to see if I was a spy, and withdrawn when they eventually realised the idea was absurd) would often put flowers on the Andropov monument as she came to work.

Anyway, whatever the key difference is, Edward thinks Vladimir Putin is a global threat, and I think he’s not. In fact I think he’s less of a general menace than Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish leader, whose internal repression is probably worse than Putin’s, whose country’s corruption is comparable to Russia’s, and whose intervention in Syria has had bloody and terrible consequences. Yet Edward’s newspaper, the Economist, is always hard on Putin but soft on Erdogan, whom it misleadingly calls ‘Mildly Islamist’, when in fact the truth is he’s cunningly but strongly Islamist (or was, until he went wild over Syria, and wilder still when the Istanbul crowds dared to protest against him). This inconsistency, like all such inconsistencies, might help us explain what the real problem is.

Both of us more or less agree that Putin’s a domestic tyrant with a nasty regime at his back, but our explanations for this, and our concerns about it, are different.

And yet we enjoy each other’s company, and I for one think highly of Edward’s work.

Disagreement, you see, can be a civilised pleasure. But not always. I’m not sure it was at a student debate on drugs I attended on Thursday night, where I felt that the meeting was so unfairly organised that I threatened to leave, to ensure some semblance of fairness. I must admit to being bored sick, and deeply angered, by the repeated, dishonest claims of the liberalisers, and their utter irresponsibility. I think I have probably come to the end of this argument. Yet, at the end, my side appeared to have won. If so, it was mainly thanks to my fellow anti-legaliser Josephine Hart, whose direct personal experience of the hell which invades your life when a person you love takes to drug abuse, has convinced her of the need for law, and who is (under the circumstances) miraculously patient with the other side.

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29 November 2012 12:04 PM

I am grateful to those who responded with interest , or otherwise welcomed my review of ‘Orderly and Humane’, a book which I do very much hope will be widely read and discussed. I am even grateful to those who wrote to point out the typographical errors in the posting . I would just ask them, rather than to make this a genuine expression of disapproval, to tell me what the errors are so that I can put them right. I have no sub-editors here to rescue me from my own bad typing. I learned from the age of eight to type badly and fast with four fingers, which is how most journalists type, and computers, for reasons I have never fully understood, make me even more error-prone than I was in the days of ribbons and paper. actually it is, alas, impossible to correct your own work properly, even after five readings I will still fail to spot glaring errors, as the writer sees what he hopes and expects to see, a microcosm of the problem of knowledge, belief and understanding which we would do well to heed. We need other people to help us get things right.

I am also grateful to one stern critic, ‘Frankz’ , who writes :’I generally respect your opinion but what can be said here? I must admit you wore me down about half way through. In a war that cost 56 million lives by some estimates the list of atrocities is endless. How easy to make a catalogue of them and thereby conjure a historical road block. Another war to end all wars even as the seeds of the next one are sown by those who fervently spread this illusion and think they can give it substance by the force of their character and the humanity of their concern. There is so much here that is lacking. Those that fought did not die in vain unlike the millions rounded up like cattle and exterminated like vermin in the camps. To those that toss and turn at night over the bombs dropped on the cultured and impeccably European inhabitants of Dresden, I say first consider the bombs not dropped on Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka. I feel that almost all of your points could be easily refuted or shown to be narrow in focus but to what end? It would change nothing. I will only point out that that England did not go to war to defend Poland as you very well know. England went to War to preserve her own Identity. If she had compromised it the liberty you defend would be a worthless sot granted to a vanquished and ethnically cleansed people.’

I am always a little discouraged when people appear to sigh, as if their opinion was obviously right (‘what can be said here?’) . It betokens an unwillingness to alter a long-held view. First, the atrocities I listed followed the war and did not take place during the war. Secondly, they were planned and approved at the highest level.

I made no comment about whether people died ‘in vain’ , not myself being qualified to judge the circumstances in which a death is ‘in vain’, but suspecting they are known elsewhere, by authorities more knowledgeable, and more highly-placed, than us.

But I am not sure what he means by ‘To those that toss and turn at night over the bombs dropped on the cultured and impeccably European inhabitants of Dresden, I say first consider the bombs not dropped on Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka’. Perhaps he could elaborate?

If he means what he thinks I mean, it is indeed an interesting indictment of the allied war effort, widely believed by those educated since the 1970s to have been principally a rescue operation to save persecuted Jews, that the allies made no effort of any kind to help Europe’s Jews or hinder the industrial murder of them . Professor Douglas provides a partial explanation of this. The Polish wartime leader Wladyslaw Sikorski told Anthony Eden (p.24) that it would be ‘quite impossible… for Poland to continue to maintain 3.5 million Jews after the war. Room must be found for them elsewhere’ (any serious historian knows that pre-war Poland, our future gallant ally, was a hive of rather vicious Judophobia, though it’s not done in fashionable circles to stress it these days). I might add his mention of remarks by the then British ambassador to Warsaw, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, ‘The slaughter of Jews in this country has made the towns a good deal cleaner, and has certainly decreased the number of middle-men’ (p.182, taken from British Foreign Office files, exact reference in the book). Professor Douglas says that anti-semitism in Poland remained ‘ at ‘pathologically high levels’ even after the slaughter of most of the country’s Jews.

But it seems unlikely to me that a failure to act to save the Jews in any way excuses the slaughter of German civilians. The logic of that simply escapes me.

He then adds :’ . I will only point out that that England did not go to war to defend Poland as you very well know. England went to War to preserve her own Identity. If she had compromised it the liberty you defend would be a worthless sot granted to a vanquished and ethnically cleansed people.’

Well, if her aim was to preserve her identity, then she made a pretty poor job of it. Any normal person transported from the Britain of 1939 to the culture and civilisation occupying the same space today would find it so transformed as to be baffling and frightening. Much of that transformation , the Americanisation, the destruction of historical landmarks, the changes in manners and diet, the debasement of language, morals, manners and of educational standards, the assault on privacy, the overcrowding, noise , state interference, crime and disorder, are directly traceable to our incompetent participation in the war, which we entered at the worst possible moment and then promptly lost, only to be subsumed in the strategic schemes of the USA and the USSR, neither of which had any interest in preserving us as a major independent power(the sine qua non of keeping one’s identity).

So if that was our aim it was a very poorly pursued aim, which we failed to achieve, and the timing of our entry, wholly dictated by the ludicrous and empty guarantee to Poland, was the principal reason for our failure.

Now , a few words about ‘Bert’, our most pretentiously-named contributor, who once again speaks out from his solipsistic mountain top. And what a delight it is to see what he says (in this case to Paul Noonan) :’ I don’t know why you’re babbling on about ‘huge campaigns’ in the fire brigades (I’ve never heard of them).’

Now, poor old Bert misses quite a lot of developments. He’d also never heard, for instance of the EU Landfill Directive. And when it was explained to him that it had a profound effect on rubbish collection in this country (is indeed the principal reason for the spread of fortnightly collections) he was unable to acknowledge this and has yet, to my knowledge, to admit that he was mistaken and inadequately informed on this subject.

Bert is never wrong, for if it looks as if he might be , he changes the subject . Recently he accused me of denying freedom to non-believers by recommending the teaching of Christianity, as truth, to children. When I pointed out that I advocated the continuance of the existing freedom for parents to opt out of such teaching, he said that didn’t count because parents were apathetic. Then he changed the subject, to say that it would be all right to teach them *about* Christianity (i.e. as an anthropological peculiarity of others, rather than as a faith they might be reasonably expected to embrace and follow in their own lives), but it would be an assault on their freedom to teach it to them as if it were the national religion, and foundation of the civilisation in which they lived.

Well, that’s just slippery. How can a national religion survive if the schools don’t endorse it? It’s not as if any mechanism exists to force those taught it in this way to accept that it *is* true. They can disbelieve it when they’re taught it, or renounce it later, as many do. Indeed, they then know what it is they disbelieve, and can criticise it more effectively.

But if they’re never taught it as truth, at an age when they are interested in such questions ( and the young are more interested in the great questions than anyone else, except perhaps the dying) the they will be denied the chance to decide to believe it at all. And this will gradually cease to be a Christian country.

So what ‘Bert’ is actually saying is that we should follow a policy which will provide the ‘freedom’ to believe in nothing, or to have no belief, but not offer the freedom to believe. Meanwhile the state schools teach( as truth) the ideas of sexual permissiveness and egalitarianism, in PSHE classes and ‘Bert’ has not, to my knowledge offered any objection to this, or described it as an abridgement of freedom that it is so. If he does so now, he will at least have achieved a sort of consistency. But his real purpose, the deliberate secularisation of a formerly Christian country, cannot be cloaked as a struggle for ‘freedom’.

As to the campaign top recruit women into the Fire Service, I refer him to an article (reproduced below) which I wrote for the Mail on Sunday of 7th April 2002, which describes the official measures. I suspect ‘Bert’ of not himself being in the Fire Brigade, which would explain his unawareness of this campaign:

Were the Government to announce that within seven years 15 per cent of nannies would have to be male, everyone would think they had gone mad. Yet an equally absurd plan - to feminise the fire brigades of Britain - is quietly under way, and many in the fire service fear it will one day lead to needless deaths. They believe it has already done severe damage to discipline and morale. However, a creepy censorship prevents them from speaking their minds. With employers and union united in the anti-sexist cause, honest doubt is being stifled by a totalitarian refusal to admit there might be a problem.

Fighting fires is as masculine as nannying is feminine. This is not just because it has always been done by men, but because physical strength is at the very heart of it. Firefighters do many things but the job we really pay them for is the one that nobody else can do: bringing human beings out of burning buildings or cars before they die. Some women have proved they can do the job: a small group who have earned the respect of their fellows by working hard and well. They have also survived the bullying, insults and 'practical jokes' which tight-knit groups often inflict on newcomers.

However, their hard-won position will actually be undermined by the Government's 15 per cent quota, because all firewomen are now bound to be suspected of having slipped through the selection process because of their sex.

Even when the tyranny of political correctness grips almost every field of life, most sensible societies recognise there are limits. But the ultra-feminist movement besieges the strongest outposts of a male society, precisely because such outposts remind everyone that sex discrimination is often sensible in real life.

Get rid of them and you are halfway to destroying the old male role of husband, father and provider, which is the real target of these extremists.

The current campaign became possible in 1997, when 5ft 3in Gillian Maxwell was turned down by the Northern Ireland Fire Authority because she was not tall enough. She took them to a tribunal, arguing that the existing height rule discriminated against women because it excluded 60 per cent of the female population. In these strange times, this suspect argument was enough to overturn the 1947 Fire Services Act which had set a minimum height of 5ft 6in for all UK fire brigades. Since then, many more women, and incidentally large numbers of small men, have tried to join up.

Fire services found it hard to defend their sensible policy of hiring big, strong men, not because the policy was wrong but because of the boorish stupidity of some firemen, who deliberately persecuted female colleagues. This obscured the intelligent arguments against having large numbers of small female firefighters. It is not much use saying you have nothing against women if you deliberately foul the ladies' loo, order female colleagues to make your tea and noisily watch pornographic videos when women are around.

There have been other changes, too. Discipline is now derided as 'militaristic'. The proud name of 'brigade' is being phased out and replaced by 'service'. More graduates are joining, and veterans wonder - with reason - what use a degree is in a fire. They say the new mood has led to a decline in the old team spirit, which they believe is vital in the heat, danger and potential panic of a serious fire.

There is also a nasty, totalitarian atmosphere in which people are afraid of speaking. All the firemen - and firewomen - who wrote or spoke to me begged me to keep their identity secret. Complaining publicly about the new policy is death to a career and can even lead to disciplinary action.

As ever, the TV soap operas have joined the 'progressive' cause. Though most fire stations remain all-male, London's Burning features feisty fire officer Sally Fields played by Heather Peace. Reality, however, is different. Ms Peace has admitted she could not be a firefighter in real life. 'Of course not. I'd be a gibbering wreck,' she says.

Just as the police have been suffocated by political correctness since the Stephen Lawrence case, fire brigades also face a relentless campaign to change their conservative, traditional culture.

In March 1999 the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, declared that the fire service's equality record was unacceptable and that the Government wanted a service that 'looked like Britain in all its diversity'. He then set the target of 15 per cent women in the brigade by 2009, a giant increase on the current 1.4 per cent. Six months later a Home Office report rammed home the message: the service was ' institutionally sexist'.

Yet there is no evidence that the fire service's male domination has cost a single life. The report admitted: 'Exceptionally high levels of satisfaction and support are reported from the public at large.' The truth is that the fire service works well and is popular and respected. Its male culture helps keep morale and efficiency high. But under this Government, politically-driven sexual equality is more important than firefighting itself.

Is this wise? Medical experts agree that absolute strength - the maximum amount of weight that can be lifted - is far higher for men than for women. The average woman has between 50 and 60 per cent of the upper-body strength of an average man. Training and exercise can partly overcome this, but why go to all that trouble? The fire service is such a popular job that it has dozens of strong, fit applicants for every vacancy.

Yet more and more women are being chosen. How is this?

There is no standard national test for firemen, but everywhere the entry requirements have changed in the past 15 years. Chest expansion and lung capacity tests have been dropped. A simple trial - carrying a 12-stone man for 100 yards in less than a minute - has been scrapped. Now there are fitness checks that might have been designed to gloss over the differences between men and women.

Everyone from the Government downwards insists there is no sex bias. Widespread claims that women are slipped through on the nod or given special advantages are flatly denied. But in the London Fire Brigade, this boast of freedom from bias turns out not to be entirely true. Women can repeat fitness tests if they fail, without having to go back to the beginning.

This is said to be part of a 'positive action programme'. If the Government really wants to hire an extra 6,500 firewomen in the next seven years, there is going to have to be a lot of such 'positive action'.

And positive for whom? I have spoken to many experienced firemen who are convinced that more women in the fire service will mean needless deaths in the future, either of members of the public or of firemen whose colleagues cannot rescue them. To be fair, I have also spoken to union officials and firewomen who say we have nothing to fear.

There is, sadly, only one way to find out, which is to follow the current policy and see what happens.

But why should a successful and effective service be revolutionised, and why should the public be guinea pigs in a social experiment driven by militant feminism? Is this extremist campaign worth a single human life? ‘

A footnote. A contributor asked to which system of thought Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill subscribed. Well, Attlee is on record as saying that he did not believe in a deity, though tought the Christian ethic very fine. Winston Churchill's private religious beliefs are, so far as I know, a matter of controversy among those who have studied his life and work. I'd be interested to hear from anyone with knowledge on this.

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05 February 2011 9:15 PM

I have been an unheroic witness to several episodes of alleged People Power. I hid under the bed as tracer whizzed past my Bucharest hotel window, during the mysterious overthrow of the Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu.

I lay down in the dirty snow to save my skin, as the KGB Alpha Group stormed the Vilnius TV tower in the Kremlin’s last failed attempt to keep control of the Baltic states. I felt my bowels shrivel with dread when, in Moscow in 1991, I heard the unmistakable sound of gunshots finding their human targets.

More enjoyably, and more safely, I stood amid ecstatic crowds in Prague as they jeered their communist rulers into oblivion, marched alongside Hungarian democrats in Budapest and rejoiced to see the sunny Russian morning when every litter-bin in the capital was full of burning Communist Party membership cards.

It was intoxicating and exhilarating even when it was also terrifying. I am the sort of reporter who only goes to war zones because he hasn’t been properly briefed (I once touched down in Somalia in a blue suit and polished shoes).

But these days, whenever I see a huge crowd on TV, surging through some central square in some wretched despotism, my heart sinks. I don’t want to be there, among the nice, gullible people whose absurd hopes are bound to be disappointed.

I know what will come next – a let-down.

We have already pretty much forgotten Tunisia, whose crowds our electronic media lauded and encouraged only weeks ago. Anyone know what is going on there now? Or care much? Thought not.

The liberation of Romania was followed by an era of renewed corruption and political squalor that has not come to an end and is not likely to. No doubt it was preferable to the former regime, but it cannot possibly measure up to the semi-religious hopes raised back in 1989 by overwrought commentators, including me.

I have seen it argued – credibly – that the joyous return of freedom to Prague was orchestrated by the KGB. And look at what followed.

Post-communist Russia is not the beautiful, rich and civilised land it could be and ought to be, but a crime family posing as a nation. For many people there, the choice between the old regime and the new one is not an easy one.

Poor old Prague is now just the capital of a subjugated province in the new German Empire that we politely call the European Union. The same goes for the Baltic republics and Romania. And, more importantly to me, for us here in Britain.

It is much nicer for them to be ruled from Berlin and Brussels than to be ruled from Moscow, though nothing like as nice as they might once have hoped.

But it is not nicer for us to be ruled from Berlin and Brussels rather than ruling ourselves, as we more or less did before 1989, when the Cold War kept Germany down, the Americans in and the Russians out.

Would I, knowing what I know now, have been so keen on the liberation of Eastern Europe 20 years ago? No. I would in the end have sacrificed their freedom in return for ours.

And if I am ruthlessly honest – as I ought to be – I would sacrifice the freedom of the people of Egypt for my prosperity and stability, if that is the bargain on offer. And I think it is. There, I’ve said it.

We’re moral beings, not lab rats

By treating human beings as if they were laboratory rats, we have tried for decades to coax and corral them into sensible behaviour. This idea is called ‘harm reduction’ and lies behind the stupid, failed policies that have led to epidemic drug-taking and promiscuity.

It assumes people will do bad and stupid things, and that they should be helped to do them as safely as possible. I regard it as immoral and repulsive. But who cares what I think? Even so, perhaps they should begin to wonder if we moral dinosaurs have a point.

A keystone of the harm-reduction policy has been the free, easy issue of the ‘morning-after pill’. Abortion on demand had somehow failed to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.

How about issuing to human females a drug originally designed for female pedigree dogs, to rid them of the unwanted consequences of street encounters with mongrel males?

Earlier research has already suggested that, as the scientists delicately put it, ‘the increase in pregnancy rates from, for example, greater sexual activity may cancel out reductions in pregnancy rates from greater use of Emergency Birth Control’.

Or, as I would put it, the knowledge that a one-night stand need have no consequences will increase the number of one-night stands.

But now Professors Sourafel Girma and David Paton, from Nottingham University, have gone a stage further. Schemes to make morning-after pills more readily available have, they say, been followed by more diagnoses of sexually transmitted infections.

The meaning of this is clear. More pills mean more promiscuity.

‘Harm reduction’, as usual, has increased harm. We are not laboratory rats, or dogs, but human beings with the ability to make moral choices. And the last people to grasp this will be those who govern this country.

The sound of ignorance

Amazing how almost nobody in broadcasting knows anything about the past. Numerous BBC announcers last week pronounced the name of the Egyptian city ‘Soo-ez’, as if they’d never heard the word before.

Quite possibly they hadn’t. Which means they know nothing about one of the most significant events in our history, the Suez disaster (always pronounced ‘Soo-iz’) of 1956.

********************Special ambulances are to be bought to transport fat, ill people about the country. And a new branch of medicine, bariatrics, has arisen to treat people too fat for their own good. I wonder how many of these fat, ill people are also officially poor.

********************A grandiose judge, Sir Nicholas Wall, thinks unmarried people should get the legal rights that married people have. You might as well make people judges without requiring them to pass law exams and gain experience in the courts. And Sir Nicholas might as well have said ‘Let’s abolish marriage’.

Marriage is a solemn contract, in which binding promises are made, mainly for the benefit of children and the old and ill.

The law gave it special privileges in return because, in our old free society, the Government recognised that such stable unions were good for everyone.

Without those privileges, marriage will die, because it is difficult, and needs to be supported through the bad times that besiege every couple. And a privilege stops being a privilege if it is given to everyone, as privileged Sir Nicholas really ought to know.

But the modern state (which is startlingly bad at looking after children, the sick and the old) hates marriage. It is private, beyond its control.

It raises individual humans rather than conformist consumers. It keeps women out of wage-slavery and children out of day-orphanages, and resists the politically correct propaganda that pours out of the media and the schools.

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05 November 2009 12:53 PM

I walked over to Queen Anne's Gate on Wednesday afternoon in plenty of time to secure a front-row seat at David Cameron's pitiful U-turn speech on the EU referendum. (I found myself sitting next to William Hague, and gruffly exchanged the time of day with him. It's a long time since we've spoken despite my once having been alleged to be his 'guru').

Two things were pitiful about the speech: one, its content; two its generally low-key, excuse-making reception by all but a few media outlets. When the Prime Minister behaves like this, he is said to have 'bottled', 'u-turned' and broken his promises. Well, why not? It's true. But if you use such language about a politician, then you must use it against all politicians who behave in this way, not just against the one you oppose.

Mr Cameron is in many ways the 'heir to Blair' that he said he would be, and I was amused to find that he is also copying his exemplar in his treatment of me at press conferences. Even though he acknowledged me with a three-star Etonian manly glance and nod, and even though there was no huge hurry nor contest to ask questions, he paid me the immense compliment of not taking a question from me. Mr Blair used to do the same, even if mine was the only hand up in the whole vast room. My fellow journalists, amused by the performance, often used to let this happen deliberately. As a result, reporters from immensely obscure foreign media outlets learned that they could question the Labour leader if they put their hands up at the same time as me. The Beekeeper's Gazette could have got a question if they had turned up. When, after many weeks, Mr Blair eventually relented (which led to a scene, in which I was told to sit down and stop being 'bad') I had almost forgotten what I had wanted to ask. I had begun to tell people that I didn't want to ask a question at all, that holding my hand up for long periods was a Tantric Yoga technique for suppressing nausea.

What would I have asked the Tory leader? I can still remember that. It was this: ‘On a scale of one to ten, how much more is a promise of “never again” worth than a “cast-iron pledge?” ‘ I passed on this question afterwards to some broadcast journalists in the hope that they might find a use for it.

Factual questions were no use at all, as Mr Cameron's presentation was an insult to the intelligence (his and ours). Nobody who understood the British constitution or the workings of the EU could have been fooled for a moment by his proposed measures. No Parliament can bind its successors. The EU does not need any further treaties to increase its powers, as it is now a legal sovereign body (thanks to Lisbon) which can proceed according to its own wishes and no longer needs its members' agreement to enforce the ever-closer union. This is at the heart of the Treaty of Rome and is its driving, undoubted, openly-stated purpose, recognised in every EU country but ours. The whole point of Lisbon was that it took us into this new era, with the EU given its own 'legal personality', and the treaty made 'self-amending'. The EU can now have a foreign minister, a president and a diplomatic service because it is an embryonic state, which will in time grow into a fully-developed state, in which we will be a province. It will be gradual and incremental, and more obvious abroad to begin with. But it will end in national extinction. Watch, for example, as British embassies in small capitals begin to disappear, and are replaced by ‘European’ missions. Then the day will come when the British embassy in Washington DC (since it is the grandest mission of all the EU states, and the best positioned) becomes the EU Embassy, and it will be obvious to all that we are no more.

To promise referendums on future treaties now (and, in response to queries, the Latin plural is certainly referenda, but 'referendum' is now treated as an English word and most newspaper style books prescribe 'referendums' as the correct plural) is to promise to slam the stable door long after the horse has bolted. As to David Cameron's statements about British law being supreme over EU law, where has he been? Alpha Centauri? I cannot believe he does not know better. In which case, why is he mouthing this piffle, and why is he not being generally taken to task for it?

And anything apparently safe from EU encroachment (as Mrs Thatcher repeatedly discovered at the hands of Jacques Delors) can easily be made unsafe during the deal-making which is essential to the EU's government.

What's more, it has been quite obvious to me that the pledge of a referendum was unsustainable, that Lisbon was going to be ratified long before the Tories were in a position to call their promised referendum. Yet the pledge, which Mr Cameron now claims was conditional, was nothing of the kind. It was explicit. It was unconditional:’If I become prime minister, a Conservative government will hold a referendum on any EU Treaty that emerges from these negotiations.’

Loyalist Tories couldn't answer the glaring question ‘What happens if the treaty is ratified first?’ Did Mr Cameron really not grasp what he had said? This is surely stretching credulity to snapping point. This was a pledge made to be broken and frankly, anyone who was (wilfully) fooled by it deserves everything he now gets. (Anyone who knows anything about cast iron knows that it is a rather brittle substance, which may have been in Mr Cameron's mind when he wrote his promise.) The Conservative leader ought to be on a rack of mockery and interrogation at the moment. The sketch-writers should be laughing at his twitchy, fake-sombre evasions and his pose as the defender of British sovereignty, flanked by a portrait of Churchill. But they're not. That would be to risk discussing actual politics, and we can't have that.

Yet even as recently as the Tory conference in Manchester quite senior (and well-educated) Tory persons were still insisting that there was no problem. They hid behind Poland and the Czech Republic, then still hesitating over ratification. This was a pose that might have fooled a bog-standard lobby correspondent but which certainly didn't bamboozle me, a former (and still occasional) foreign reporter familiar with Central Europe. I wrote at length from Prague back in February about the bravery of Vaclav Klaus, when most Tories had never heard of him and couldn't have pronounced his name. I said then that we couldn't expect him to save us. We had to do that ourselves. Which we do. So where are the famous Tory 'Eurosceptics’ now? A bit of vague moaning and mild campaigning for a referendum (which will get nowhere) won't make any difference. They must realise now that David Cameron's Tory Party is a pro-EU body, and that there is no mechanism for changing that. If they remain in it, and work for its victory at the next election, they will be de facto supporters of EU aggrandisement, helping to sustain in existence a party which has in the whole post-war era aided the expansion and consolidation of the EU, and the extinction of British national independence. Why don't they leave it? What possible excuse do they have for continuing to pretend that David Cameron is an opponent, in deeds, of the EU Superstate he opposes with his lips?

The whole thing reminded me of the wretched Harold Wilson back in the late 1960s, after he had been utterly defeated by the Trades Union Congress over his plans to curb strikes with legal powers. After capitulating to the then superior power of the unions, he spoke of a 'Solemn and Binding' agreement with the TUC, under which they would allegedly behave themselves in future. Of course, he knew they wouldn't. So did they. The whole thing was a transparent fiction, designed to cover up a dishonourable and complete defeat of Her Majesty's Government, just as Mr Cameron's 'never again' pledge is a fiction designed to cover up the total failure of his party to fight for what it claims to believe in.

The great Alan Watkins there and then invented a fictional character called 'Solomon Binding' , who would be mockingly mentioned every time the unions called, or failed to prevent, some disastrous economy-wrecking stoppage. I think dear old Solomon Binding, who I thought dead and buried during the Norman Tebbit age, has clambered out of his grave and staggered, crusted with earth and worms, to stand zombie-like at David Cameron's shoulder, mouthing the immortal words 'Solemn and Binding' and, from time to time 'Never again' or even 'Cast iron pledge.'

31 October 2009 8:18 PM

Once again, one of the biggest stories of the week has been widely ignored by the official political reporters, who are not interested in politics.

This is the disclosure, by a New Labour apparatchik, Andrew Neather, of the real purpose of his party’s immigration policy.

The Blairites’ aim was to undermine and get rid of traditional conservative British culture. They really did want to turn Britain into a foreign land.

Mr Neather wrote an article praising immigration because it provided lots of cheap nannies and gardeners for funky Londoners like him.

Apparently thinking nobody would notice, he then revealed that there had been ‘a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the UK Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’.

He recalled coming away from high-level discussions ‘with a clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn’t its main purpose - to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.

I have to say I am not surprised. Nor am I so sure about the ‘main purpose’.

In late 1996, an old friend of mine abandoned his long career as a distinguished journalist and went to work for New Labour.

We held a sort of wake, since from now on we would be opponents. I asked him why he had done this awful thing. He replied: ‘You have no idea at all just how enormous the New Labour Project is.’

This was one of those moments when a shiver really does run down the spine.

Knowing the Labour leader to be a Blair of Very Little Brain, I had assumed he was no more than window-dressing for a standard-issue high-tax anti-British socialist government.

From then on, I began to suspect that something much bigger was afoot - a gigantic, irreversible cultural, social and sexual revolution, accompanied by huge constitutional change - a slow-motion putsch.

I think that suspicion was borne out. Mass immigration, so vast that Britain would have to adapt to the migrants rather than the other way round, would be very useful in attaining this.

You could smear your opposition as ‘racist’ if they dared to resist.

And they would run away. Anthony Blair’s hysterical speech ‘attacking the ‘forces of conservatism’ in September 1999 was a barely coded warning of what was to come.

He all but blamed the Tories for murdering Martin Luther King and locking up Nelson Mandela. He specifically praised the curse of multiculturalism.

As my colleague Simon Walters points out, William Hague grasped what was happening, and in March 2001 he sought to oppose it with a bold speech.

He warned that after two terms of Labour, Britain would be a ‘foreign land’. He was dead right.

I have searched out that speech and read it carefully. There isn’t a bigoted word in it.

But Mr Hague was knifed in the back by liberal Tories and the power-worshipping Murdoch Press, and knifed in the front by Labour, all of whom accused him of somehow playing dirty, ‘playing the race card’ or ‘playing the nationalist card’.

A plot to replace him was openly leaked, months before a General Election. Rather than fight to the last, Mr Hague regrettably crumpled in the face of this onslaught.

And so perished the last attempt by any mainstream party to address this huge and dangerous issue honestly, or indeed to confront the revolutionary intentions of New Labour.

A few weeks later, Mr Blair told the Tories to accept his revolution. They did. And the British people are left without a legitimate voice at Westminster.

Good riddance to Professor Poison

Cannabis is an evil lottery ticket whose top prize is a lifetime gibbering in a locked ward. And it pays out rather more often than the other lottery.

So it is pleasing to see the dismissal of the fatuous Professor David Nutt, the Government’s supposedly scientific adviser on drugs.

Professor Nutt seems strangely unaware of the mounting evidence of the dangers of cannabis, particularly the work of Robin Murray, who recently savaged Professor Nutt’s use of statistics and attacked the general sloppiness of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.

Professor Nutt’s diversionary tactic of claiming that tobacco and alcohol are ‘more dangerous’ than some illegal drugs is the age-old excuse of the hippy generation.

So what if they are? How does the existence of two legal poisons justify the creation of more?

Why is it an argument against properly enforced laws to discourage them?

It is vital that we do all that we can to warn the young against these dangers.

It is too late to ban alcohol, though many of us would like to go back to strict licensing rules. The law worked against drunken driving and in reducing smoking.

Our drug-corrupted political and media elite view Professor Nutt as a hero because he helps them excuse their own wrongdoing.

Fake patriots with phoney poppies

I did not wear a Remembrance poppy when I appeared on the BBC’s Daily Politics TV programme on Friday (though the BBC kindly offered me one).

I think there is something deeply phoney about the way that Left-wing politicians and journalists, who until quite recently would not have bothered, now wear poppies on TV from around the end of September.

There’s a lot of fake patriotism about these days. Poppies are for November.

I never joined in the exaggerated swoon of praise for Barack Obama. But I have some respect - so far - for his unwillingness to be panicked by generals into deepening the futile deployment in Afghanistan.

I was also impressed that, unlike our own leaders, he had the decency to stand and salute the returning dead, whose homecoming George W. Bush tried to keep secret.

If soldiers’ coffins were carried through the Commons, with the maimed following in their wheelchairs, our pathetic frontbenchers might get round to debating this moronic, doomed war, and getting us out of it.

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Pretence, pretence, pretence. Now that the Czechs are, predictably, giving way under the immense pressure of the EU monster, David Cameron’s pledge of a referendum on its constitution has been shown up for an empty, cynical stunt.

Mr Cameron is a continuation of Blair by other means. Who needs this?

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The Metropolitan Police have now retreated from their plan for armed patrols.

Even so, an armed police force is slowly appearing before our eyes, without any debate in Parliament.

Actually, Parliament decreed that we would have an armed police force when it abolished the death penalty.

It was the real fear of the gallows that kept guns out of the hands of British criminals, and many more innocent people will die at the hands of armed police than ever died at the end of a rope.

But self-righteous politicians will be able to pretend it’s nothing to do with them.